Exiles build new lives on old memories

Omar Karmi, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: May 11. 2008 10:46PM UAE / May 11. 2008 6:46PM GMT

SHATILA REFUGEE CAMP, BEIRUT // Ahmed, 17, knows his family is from Palestine and that he supports Fatah. “But what is this Nakba you talk about?” he asks.

His ignorance, or perhaps indifference, earns him a sharp rebuke from Nohad Hamad, a counsellor in the Shatila refugee camp and Ahmed’s former teacher. “What do you mean you don’t know what the Nakba is? How do you think you and your parents came to live in this place?” she chastises.

For Ms Hamad, 49, and tens of thousands of other Palestinian refugees like her, Nakba, or the “catastrophe”, is a part of her identity. It refers to May 15 1948, the day after Israel declared its existence as a Jewish state, and the subsequent eviction of thousands from lands once known as Palestine.

Born in the Shatila camp, Ms Hamad has lived her entire life as a refugee with neither nationality nor passport. In contrast to the camp’s 8,370 current residents, however, she has married out of the squalid place – where ad hoc water pipes compete for overhead space with drooping power lines illegally tapped into the mains.

She now lives with her husband in another part of Beirut, but returns each day to teach at a camp community centre that offers vocational training and other educational services, including spreading awareness about domestic violence.

Her focus for the last few months has been teaching youth like Ahmed about Nakba in preparation for its 60th anniversary and in an attempt to rekindle a fire that has died down.

“No one here has much hope of any return” to what was Palestine, she said. “But it is important that people know and remember what happened to them.”

The fate of Palestinian refugees, their history and future, lies at the heart of the Palestinian experience. And nowhere is the plight of refugees more pronounced than in Lebanon, where some 410,000 registered refugees live, mostly in the country’s 12 UN-run camps.

Unlike in Jordan, the refugees in Lebanon carry only identity papers and UN-issued laissez passé papers, travel documents in lieu of passports. They have no social and civil rights, very limited access to Lebanese public health or educational facilities and no access to social services.

The majority rely entirely on the UN Relief and Works Agency as the sole provider of education, health and relief, and social services. Considered foreigners, Palestinian refugees are prohibited from working in more than 70 trades and professions in Lebanon.

In these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Ms Hamad’s father, Jamil, 72, will take any offer he gets to return, whether to the land where he was born, which is now northern Israel or to the occupied West Bank.

“We have no rights here,” said the shopkeeper, who fled with his mother in 1948 when he was 12. “If we get a state on the 1967 borders, that’s OK. But it has to be all the land occupied in 1967. I want to return, but I have little hope. For me, now, I have family and I have religion. I have no country.”

Jamil Hamad still remembers vividly how he escaped death at the hands of the Zionist Haganah Brigades in 1948 because of his age when their village, Safsaf, near Safad, was overrun.

“The Arab Liberation Army [the volunteer forces from Arab countries that came to Palestine to fight the Zionists in 1948] was rubbish. They didn’t know how to shoot a gun. But in our village there was heavy fighting. The Zionists suffered big losses, and when they finally took the village they wanted revenge.”

The Oct 29 massacre that ensued has been well documented and was the subject of at least two internal Israeli inquiries in 1949. The findings remain classified. What seems clear, however, from the testament of survivors, is that the invading forces separated the men from the women and children, then executed between 50 and 70 of the former group.

“They lined them up against a wall and machine-gunned them down,” Mr Hamad said. Fifteen of those dead were relatives including his father and two uncles. The rest of the villagers fled to Lebanon. The village itself, like 500 other Palestinian villages at the time, was razed to the ground.

The current negotiations between the PLO leadership and the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert offer neither father nor daughter any hope. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is from Safad. “People from there fled to Safsaf in 1948. He knows well what happened there. How can he sit and talk with these Israelis, forgetting all those that died?” Mr Hamad said.

For her part, Ms Hamad, who goes by her maiden name, clings to hope that one day she will be able to leave Lebanon. First, she said, Palestinians have to stop fighting each other.

But she too has little hope for negotiations.

“If we lost a battle in 1982 [when the PLO was expelled from Lebanon], we lost the war in Oslo.” Many Palestinians think Yasser Ararfat gave away too much when he signed the Oslo Accord in 1993.

For now, she says, the best she can do is educate youngsters in the camp about their history.

okarmi@thenational.ae